The cost of commissioning
The price for commissioning is calculated on a case-by-case basis and often includes the use of an activity matrix for estimating hours.
The economics of a commissioning process is often estimated to be 0.5% to 2% of the construction costs. This is an empirical figure that varies depending on the client's involvement, the complexity of the project, and its size.
By implementing commissioning, significant savings are often achieved elsewhere in the project process, which ensures a short payback period for commissioning. This can involve specific elements discovered during commissioning reviews or simple factors like interdisciplinary coordination during the execution of commissioning tests.
The economics also reflect the scope of commissioning - the scope is defined during the adaptation phase and includes both the number of commissioning activities as well as the disciplines involved.
What is used to specify the commissioning cost?
The scope of the commissioning process must be clearly defined before a price is quoted for a commissioning task.
Often, clients are not fully aware of their needs for commissioning; therefore, the client’s procurement officer should specify a concrete commissioning process as a basis and divide the remaining commissioning activities into possible options.
If a commissioning process is simply offered as ASHRAE Std. 202, the received bids will vary significantly, as the standard is a process description that can serve as a basis for specifying the commissioning process.
How is the economic model set up?
A simple framework for estimating costs associated with commissioning is to create a table with the commissioning activities and the corresponding time.
A simple setup for estimating costs related to Commissioning is shown below. Please note that the setup below has a direct reference to the Commissioning plan, which can also be downloaded from the page.
| Activity | CxA | CxT | Contractor | Designer | O&M |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Organization | 6 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| OPR | 10 | 12 | 0 | 4 | 8 |
| Cx Plan | 8 | 2 | 0 | 2 | 0 |
| BOD | 2 | 8 | 0 | 20 | 0 |
| Cx Log | 3 | 3 | 3 | 3 | 3 |
| Accept of Phase | 2 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 |
Smart ways to calculate and reduce Cx costs
The commissioning process structures and utilizes many existing works and processes, which opens the possibility to streamline the process based on the known work of the involved parties, thereby minimizing the direct costs associated with the commissioning process.
If the client has a client-specific commissioning process, this should be outlined in the tender material; otherwise, the tender documents should be closely examined regarding this.
Below are several examples of commissioning activities that are often included in construction projects, meaning that the commissioning process only needs to structure and systematize these.
Commissioning requirements
Check if the client has any client standards, requirements from previous projects, or a building mass on which the requirements can be based.
System manual
Current systems manuals can often serve as a solid foundation for the system manual. If the client already has a document management system or O&M software, these requirements should also be included.
Interdisciplinary review
Does the client have a competent operations organization with expertise that can participate in the review? If the construction has comparable aspects to other projects by the client, it should be investigated whether the respective operational resources can participate in the review with their experience.
Site inspection
Combining commissioning site inspections with the client's or designers inspections supervision.
Commissioning plan
If there is a general plan describing the project’s phase division, this can be combined with the commissioning plan.